Set largely during a long car trip, a mother-and-son novel with compelling psychological gear shifts but not enough traction.
The belated second installment of the Swiss novelist’s semiautobiographical remembrance of his wealthy family’s Nazi-stained past.
In Kracht’s Faserland (1995), the young author of a novel with that title wandered across Europe, kissing off the 1980s with his aimlessness and addictions. Picking up where that book left off, Kracht’s sequel begins in Zurich, where the fictional novelist, Christian, goes to care for his 80-year-old mother, newly released from a mental institution. Subsisting on vodka and barbiturates, she is, “like Miss Havisham, caught in a spider web of resentment, fury, and loneliness.” So, in his cynical fashion, is Christian, still grappling with childhood abuses. His mother’s malicious bag of tricks included feigning death on the laundry room floor. When not dancing to Dietrich in women’s clothing, his father lived to torment and debase others. And Christian’s maternal grandfather was an active Nazi sympathizer. Christian, who loves his mother despite everything, decides to take her on a long road trip in a hired car before putting her back in the mental hospital. During the journey, we learn that he wore makeup from the age of 13 to 27, wishes he had David Bowie’s crooked teeth, and prefers spy thrillers to the intellectual classics his mother tries to force on him. He uses the trip to give away her vast savings, “money we had swindled from arms factories,” and she hopes to see an edelweiss flower for the first time. A leading figure in European postmodernism, the 57-year-old Kracht offsets Christian’s rock-generation disillusionment with charged language. As entertaining as that is, this novel feels incomplete. It needs to be read with its short predecessor—and its possible successor(s)—to achieve lasting power.
Set largely during a long car trip, a mother-and-son novel with compelling psychological gear shifts but not enough traction.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781324094562
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
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Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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